Playing with Classic Traveller Book 1 Chargen

Spent some time this morning generating characters from CT Book 1, intending to use them as pregens for a game in the office.

The inability to follow up a career where you failed to reenlist with another career makes for many more low-term characters than I recall seeing in Mongoose.

I don't think we ever rolled stats in order in Mongoose either.  Given the smaller set of careers, if there's something in particular that the party still "needs", fishing it out is much more challenging.

Intelligence seems, if not "king" of the attributes during character generation, at least very widely applicable.  The only career that doesn't get some sort of benefit for good Int is Army, and Merchants rely almost exclusively on Int.  Navy and Marines both have high thresholds for bonuses, and Marines have the widest set of stats to get bonuses from (ye olde Multiple Ability Score Distribution).

Just under half of the characters I generated died, mostly in their first term after a failed enlistment roll and then drafting into a service where they had no bonuses to survival.

The Other career seems terrible.  If you have the Int for the survival bonus, you also have the Int to go Merchant and pick up rank for extra skill and benefit rolls.  It's funny that the "two skills per term" on the Scout is justified with their lack of promotion, but Other doesn't have ranks or double skills.  I guess the play with Other is to hope for Gambling and the 100k cash roll.  It's on both of their skill tables that aren't Edu gated, and you don't really want to be rolling on Personal Development because the -1 Soc result is worse than nothing.

I was surprised at how hard it has been to fish out Pilot, Engineering, and Computer.  You basically need to be high-Edu Navy, Scout, or Merchant, and neither Scout nor Merchant reward Edu in their career throws.  Leader and Admin are likewise locked behind high Edu.

I had previously been pretty skeptical of the expanded character generation rules from eg Mercenary and High Guard.  They seemed like power creep, but having spent more time with the Book 1 rules, I can definitely see the appeal of the college-type options to guarantee access to certain important skills like Medic and Pilot, as well as access to the Advanced Education skills table.

The aging table also kicks in much more aggressively than in Mongoose; you probably lose 1-2 points of physical attributes after each of terms 4-6, whereas in Mongoose you might get unlucky and lose a couple points after one of those terms but it was inconsistent until you hit 6-7 terms.  In Mongoose after the 4th term you have a 1 in 36 chance of losing 1 point from each physical attribute; in CT that chance of losing 1 point from each physical attribute after your 4th term is like 15%.  In Mongoose after your 4th term your odds of not taking any aging penalties are like 80%; in CT after your 4th term your odds of not taking any aging penalties are closer to 10%.  And no anagathics during chargen like Mongoose.

So between stats in order making enlistment and survival rolls tougher, and harsher aging penalties, I suspect characters probably end up skewing younger under good play.  You're definitely going to pay stats for those terms 4-6 in a way that you probably didn't in Mongoose.  Lack of enlisted ranks combined with shorter careers also makes for fewer rolls for benefits.

I still don't have a workable-looking pregen party with a broad skill distribution, because my dice hate rolling high Edu apparently.  But at least I learned some things.